IIUC that's similar to how the electricity grid works in Texas - the last mile is public, but then there are dozens of power companies that contract and subcontract to supply the actual juice. It is, reportedly, a disaster. You get small new companies popping up all the time and dying through mergers and acquisitions. Some own just a single power plant, some own nothing physical at all and are just a reseller to handle billing & arbitrage or broker cost differences. If there's a problem theres's nobody to call and nobody whose responsibility is fixing it. Consumers are left in the lurch whenever there's a merger or acquisition, and the company they pay their bills to usually bears little resemblance to who they initially signed up with.

(Come to think of it, before the wave of banking consolidation in the mid-2000s, this also described the banking situation in New England. My college bank account went from Bank of the West to BankNorth to TD BankNorth in the time it took me to graduate, and my credit card went from BankNorth to TD BankNorth to FIA Card Services to Bank of America in the 3 years I stayed in Massachusetts after graduation.)

IMHO the root problem is that consumers have no leverage because there are millions of them and none own any of the means of production, and so I'm more bullish on new technologies like mesh networking as a way of solving the problem.